The gnawing fear at the back of the mind of many people throughout history has been that we may just be a brain in a vat, being fed impulses, imprisoned in a never-ending dream. Or merely a creation of someone else’s dream.
The past few years have seen more and more people ask a similar question that appears more likely: are we living in a computer simulation? Given the frenetic pace of computer graphics, it’s not far-fetched to believe that we are ourselves plugged into some digital “game”, developed sometime in the far future. What could be the purpose of such a simulation? Maybe we entered the simulation of our own free will, eager to experience life on the eve of some technological revolution. Maybe we are ourselves AI beings who wish to experience ancient biological life through the eyes of our imperfect creators.
Or we’re the digital copy of a real person living inside an advanced dating app, a la Black Mirror’s episode ‘Hang the DJ’.
Dreams feel real at the time we are experiencing them. The sensory experience within dreams is almost indistinguishable from waking life. It’s only after the dream that we realize it was “only a dream”.
Typing on this keyboard, drinking this coffee feels real right now. But in the same way that its difficult to remember dreams, I’ve only had vague memories of “waking life” while inside a dream.
This train of thought brings with it the truth that we would never truly know whether we were in the “real” world, even if we were brought out of the simulation.
According to the theorists, simulating various quantum phenomena is impossible in principle, due to the exponential complexity of the number of particles being simulated. “The researchers calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.”
But why should we assume that the physical laws within the simulation apply also in the “real” world? The universe in the “real” world could be vastly different than what we currently experience.
What’s more, if we are indeed living within a computer simulation, and we also develop our own convincingly real simulation that also allows users to create their own simulations within it, where does it end? How would we ever know when we finally escaped the simulation and entered the real world?
One thing about the simulation problem, once that doubt enters your mind, it never leaves.
